I think this whole behaviour could be cancelled out by making auto-renew instant. So the moment the money comes back to the lender, the offer to lend is renewed. Since the creation of the new offer is automatic and only conditioned on a single flag (whether auto-renew is still on) this should be a very lean and fast operation CPU wise for Bitfinex.

Now with this in place if you take all offers and cancel them, the offers will just immediately reappear, and you lost 1 hour of interest money for nothing.

It's like auto-renew but instant and without this apparently expensive timer batch job.

I might be able to but only if you have a good idea of what your password is. Instructions here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=343611.0

I can work with that. I have a password checker built for partially known structures with wildcards. Note that if you have both wildcards and unknown order, the number of permutations can explode very quickly. I will stop after a few hundred thousand attempts so please be as specific as possible. Any detail you can recollect will help (although false recollections have been a problem in the past so don't strain your memory trying). Please PM me with details.

Going to be awkward to wake up and realise that your high frequency spread-trading bot spent all your money on fees because BTCChina raised their fees effective immediately.

TIL Bitcoin was built on the premise that it magically prevents inflation of other currencies.

The value looks like a cork being pushed under the surface at $1000 and then bobbing up and down on Bitstamp.

I also operate a password recovery service. Indeed you don't need to risk any money - to discover and validate a password only requires empty Bitcoin addresses from the wallet.

If this is not a scam the person should be able to go back to the exchange where they bought their coins and get a screenshot of the transaction history. Of course you can fake that but it'd help provide some substance to the claim.

This kind of thinking suffers from survivorship bias. What's not in your chart are adoption curves of technologies that failed to reach 90% penetration, that failed to gain traction - like Betamax, Segways and hundreds of "next year's must have gadget". Naturally you're aware of this since you wrote as much in the title of it, but many who look at this chart will think of it in the wrong way. They won't think "if Bitcoin follows the pattern of smartphone adoption it'll grow unexpectedly fast".

It's easy to pick a selection of technologies that had an S-curve, but it's hard to find all the technologies which had a U shaped curve. They failed so we don't remember them.

Bitcoin will do great but it's possible to realise this through more careful rational thinking.

Hi historian! You look great. Hey, look, could you send a time-machine to pick me up? I'll pay you well. I'm unbelievably rich by your standards, I have whole bitcoins. Yes. Whole.

The SHA-256 is not built from right to left. An important part of a hashing algorithm is "mixing", where input "lines" are crossed left and right so they end up connecting to other output "lines". So if (simplified) bit 0 of the input is a 1 this might cause bit 129 of the output to be 0.

If this was all there was to it, it would be easy to build an algorithm that quickly ruled out unsuitable inputs. But in addition to this, the actual "direction" the bits "move" through the system is controlled by the other bits of the input. So (again simplified) we might see that if input bit 0 is a 1, and input bit 7 is a 1, bit 129 might be 0. But if input bit 7 is a 0, instead bit 201 becomes a 0 and bit 129 is unaffected.

This process is repeated on its own output over and over, until finally you have a situation where there are as many "maps" describing how each 1 input bit affects 1 output bit as there are combinations of other bits in the input. The number of possible maps is Very Large.

As you get closer and closer to the final iteration of the hash, the number internal bit states for which the final output can start with a 0 is rapidly falling off. However the "mathematical equation" for whether we'll have a leading 0 or not, which we could use to test whether we should abort the hash attempt early, is too complex and too slow to evaluate to be worth it. It's faster to just finish the hashing attempt.

I've updated the OP with instructions for how to safely send the minimal parts of your wallet required to crack the password. There is no way to steal from a wallet using only the information gathered using these instructions that I know of (although beware of some forum hacker changing the instructions in the future - if you store my GPG key 986D1761 with fingerprint 4574 6F20 AB00 974B 5578  387A DD2D 3762 986D 1761 now you can check that it hasn't changed in the future).

A Bitcoin wallet contains multiple addresses encrypted by the same key - turns out you only need one of those addresses, and it can be an empty address (no coins in it), to recover the password. I'll post more instructions here soon (maybe tomorrow) so stay tuned.

If you are one of the dozens of people on this forum who have been locked out of their encrypted Bitcoin wallet, even that you're almost certain you're remembering your password right, I'd like to try to help you.

I recently, through what felt like temporary insanity, lost an important password. I ended up developing a remarkably ambitious "password typo" generator during days of desperation.

My password generator covers a wide range of small and large mistakes that could easily have altered an original password into something other than what was intended, even when it was typed twice to confirm. I believe my system goes far beyond garden variety password permutators.

I am not trying to start a commercial service here but I'd like to give password recovery a shot as a freelancer. If you're tethering on the brink of madness, locked out of a high value wallet, let me give it a shot. You don't need to send me the wallet - only the pieces necessary to crack it. You can (and should) exclude any actual addresses with money - see instructions below.

I can't promise anything but if you give me a precise description of your likely password and how it was probably formed, I think my script stands a good chance to recover your actual password. I will test a hundred thousand combinations or so. If I succeed I'd appreciate a customary 15% tip.

Example of a good password recollection description:
"I'm POSITIVE it was horse staple battery but it just won't work. Maybe I added a number somewhere or maybe the words were in a different order. I do know I didn't use any symbols, and it was all lower case."

This is a limited time offer - I don't intend to make this my day job (unless of course I turn out to be amazingly successful and everyone keeps telling me how smart and handsome I am).



-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

## How to Safely Share a Wallet with a Password Recovery Service

Say you've lost your password for your Bitcoin wallet and you need to send it to a password recovery specialist. How can you send it without risking the coins inside?

Your wallet consists of many addresses encrypted with the same password. There will be some empty addresses which your client has generated ahead of time. What you want to do is to extract two of those empty addresses, plus the master key, giving away just enough to find and verify the password. The pieces you need are:

* The master key and its salt.
* The encryption algorithm used and its parameters.
* Two *empty* Bitcoin addresses from your wallet's set of reserve addresses.

If you send this, and only this, the specialist can find your password. Should a bad actor get the details and successfully crack the password, they'd only have 2 empty addresses to show for it.

### Instructions

Here's how to get the pieces:

1. Download the `pywallet.py` tool: https://raw.github.com/joric/pywallet/b80346d4282dff804315230e1ff26aa4d86502a2/pywallet.py
2. Install Python: http://www.python.org/getit/releases/2.7.6/
3. Open a command prompt. In Windows, press the Windows key + R. Then enter "cmd" and hit enter. On the Mac, type in "Terminal" into Spotlight and press enter.
4. Enter the following commands:

        cd ""
        python pywallet.py --dumpwallet >wallet.json

5. Open up the generated file, `wallet.json` in a text editor.
6. Scroll down to the line with `"mkey": {`  and copy and paste the whole section to the closing `}`.
7. Go up and look for 2 addresses with `"reserve": 1`. Copy everything between the `{` and `}`.

The parts you copy will look something like this:

    "mkey": {
        "crypted_key": "3ad6dc1a1e0005bf4961c145288502a30fad2732f0d52fcb94c4fbbbb12905e9f02a22f5a0fd712 68a1aca16a72c6b78",
        "nDerivationMethod": 0,
        "nDeriveIterations": 40122,
        "nID": 1,
        "salt": "47efc45626b21ffa",
        "vchOtherDerivationParameters": ""
    },
    {
        "addr": "13gUHnjSFD5uwByAuJ3RisrPwAE6pBmspn",
        "ckey": "66cf275830696f0a698722f55ce70c0c472030a27895b0bfd29b15cfee5e8a10ba8fa3ef0f6241a 50653085a0c040ebd",
        "pubkey": "03fb2183f295bd4ea92b32dc5c9a8673dca4977d0b04ce759c9b26ecd101a18472",
        "reserve": 1
    },
    {
        "addr": "19o6DUEghMRPxBBDSwYtVa8m2JjdS4mA2T",
        "ckey": "741b9d7a6cec9b1fafbcdc01cdaa0ed77d3637657ebbaccf8844ade333b6f6f733b090ea205c13c a3a79a3e9004d09a7",
        "pubkey": "03fdb290680879669af48b2ecd3304b2af54789793e5db6bc9cd6bca34aa1e9714",
        "reserve": 1
    }

(Note: if you use the pywallet version by jackjack-jj, pywallet 2.1.7, the sections will look a little different. For instance you'll see `encrypted_key` instead of `crypted_key` and `ckey` in your address will be `encrypted_privkey`.)

### What's Next?

Privately message the copied text together with every single detail you can remember about your password.

If the password is successfully recovered you need to do one last thing: get a new wallet and transfer all your coins to it (minus the generous tip to your hero password recovery specialist, of course).

The reason you must create a new wallet is that once the master key has been cracked, changing the passphrase won't "uncrack" it. You will get a new encrypted master key, but the secret it contains will remain the same. In addition, those 2 empty addresses you sent might come into use in the future if you stick with the same wallet.

Anyone who eavesdropped on your password recovery emails and successfully decrypted your master key would be able to access those previously empty addresses. What's worse, if they ever got a copy of the original wallet.dat (with all those addresses you didn't send to the recovery specialist) they could unlock everything even without knowing the new password.


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Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org

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My payment arrived today.

I sent a payment 2 days ago for 0.9 BTC that hasn't made it yet either. Clicking the transaction in Payments I get "No such transaction" from block explorer - so I guess nothing was sent.

In related news the price of $100 bills is falling hard due to increased competition from pairs of $50 bills.


I think it's interesting to think about how to deal with posts like this one. The OP is clearly both wrong and opposed to being set straight, even by the simplest and clearest of reasoning. Should such posts be systematically ignored, or will we be required to always try to respond?

If we do systematically ignore wilfully ignorant OPs, we save our time and sanity, and in the case where the OP is just trying to pick a fight/spread FUD/manipulate the market we have denied his attempt.

But the drawback of ignoring such OPs is that a malicious OP can try to use it as "evidence" that he's right, that there's no answer to his FUD or that the community is rotten, a cult and so forth. Also there will be some rare cases where OP is honestly confused and can actually be set straight by extreme repetition.

Maybe if posts could be down-voted into invisibility at the top level we could gain the benefits of the the ignore, while avoiding the costs (the posting isn't much 'evidence' if no-one can see it). As it stands now it's enough for the OP to post another response for the posting to jump back to the top of the forum even that the overwhelming consensus is that it's noise.

It should be encrypted with your Blockchain.info password. While I've never tried it, the Multibit client should decrypt and import it for you.

Volume is already higher than the other exchanges combined.

It doesn't offer much in terms of security - if someone did find your bill they'd probably just take the whole bill with them and sweep the address quickly, leaving neither evidence nor much to do about it.

But the tamper proof tape does offer peace of mind. It's the knowledge that if you did get robbed you'd know it at once, and not discover it much later when you perform a routine check of you balance.

Looks like someone already nicked the 0.1. The paper wallet looks great. The old one on bitaddress.org is too low resolution for printing, plus the private key is right there in the open necessitating that each bill is put into an envelope for security. Your bill solves those problems beautifully.

Where did you buy the tamper proof tape?